Review: Show Them a Good Time by Nicole Flattery

Humour, irony and imagination are no substitutes for tales that get the pulse racing

Review by Richard Pine

Sunday March 03 2019, 12.01am, The Sunday Times

Familiar feeling: Flattery falls short on originality

LORRAINE O’SULLIVAN

This book is not boring, not unimaginative, not without a dry humour or a sense of irony. It also does have an authorial voice — but Nicole Flattery’s narrative voice is monotonous, with almost no variation in tone, no cadences, no impetus. It is persistent without being insistent. It does not shock, nor engage the reader with its rhetoric. It will not raise readers above their own level of experience or excitement. The stories are heartfelt and poignant, but the heart needs a bypass and the poignancy needs a shot in the arm.

The second serious issue is the lack of originality. This is not a new voice in Irish fiction but a familiar echo of world literature. The stories are set in a garage